Electronic forms serve an integral role in organizing information flow for today's business applications. Such forms are widely used to manage and present business data for such enterprise business applications as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales and Distribution (SD), Financial Accounting (FI) and Human Resources (HR). To reduce the amount of programming skills necessary for creating and maintaining these forms, development tools have been created to enable users to design the look-and-feel of business forms in a graphical environment without coding. One such tool is the Smart Forms Form Builder application provided by SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany.
The graphical user interface (GUI) of the currently available Smart Forms Form Builder tool is depicted in FIG. 1. The GUI comprises three sections: navigation tree 100, maintenance screen 110 and form painter 120. Navigation tree 100 provides a tree structure of nodes that represent the output elements of the form such as pages, windows, graphics, tables, text areas, etc. Based on the selected node, maintenance screen 110 provides the area for inserting texts, establishing paragraph and character formats, setting up different attributes (fonts, borders, shading, etc.), or drawing tables and templates. Form painter 120 enables users to design the layout of the form.
The root nodes in navigation tree 100 are “Global Settings” and “Pages and windows”. “Global Settings” has three directly inferior nodes: “Form attributes”, “Form interface” and “Global definitions”. Upon selection of the “Form attributes” node, maintenance screen 110 enables the user to set attributes for the entire form, such as language attributes for the translation process, page format, style and default output settings. Upon selection of the “Form interface” node, maintenance screen 110 enables the user to define the parameter interface through which the form retrieves relevant application data from an application program. And upon selection of the “Global definitions” node, maintenance screen 110 enables the user to define variables and/or constants for use throughout the form.
“Pages and windows” has two directly inferior page nodes: “FIRST” and “NEXT”. Form painter 120 displays the directly inferior nodes of the “FIRST” page node, which include one graphic node (“MYSAPCOM”) and four window nodes (“MAIN”, “ADDRESS”, “INFO” and “FOOTER”). “MAIN” includes two text nodes (“INTRODUCTION” AND “GREETINGS”) and a table node (“TABLE”).
Currently, users of form building applications have unrestricted access to create or edit any node in a form. However, companies may desire to restrict a user's access to particular nodes within a form for which the user is responsible. For example, one division of a company may be solely responsible for the design of the corporate logo for the form, while a second division may be responsible for defining the form interface, and a third division is assigned to process the form content.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system and method that controls access to particular form elements within a form building application.